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How To Increase Traffic To Your Blog [2025]: My Secret Weapon To Go From 0 To 500,000 Page Views
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I hit a big milestone on my old travel blog, Where’s Sharon, a few years ago – I hit…
Regular readers will know that this did not come easy. I worked hard on this blog. I have not, however, worked directly on increasing page views as such. My focus has been firmly on monetisation since June 2014 and that’s across ALL of my sites.
One of the benefits of a solid monetisation strategy and starting a blog from a solid foundation is that page views that should increase on their own.
Early in my blogging journey, I published an article about the strategy I used to increase page views from 0 to 12,000 in 3 months. This was in response to a discussion in a blogging group about how such quick growth was not possible. It quickly became one of my most popular articles.
This article will address how I took that site to the next level – from 12,000 to 100,000 in another 18 months – although I think that if I knew then what I know now, I could have made that jump within 6 months.
15 months later, I made it all the way to 500,000 page views.
Click Here to Download a FREE Worksheet to help you create a marketing plan for your blog posts!
If you’re looking for ideas on how to increase blog views for your own site, you’ll find lots of tips and hopefully inspiration from my blogging journey that may help you increase blog views, too.
Updated Feb 2017, Nov 2019, Aug 2024, Nov 2024: I originally wrote this article when I hit 100,000 page views. I updated this article from 100,000 to 500,000 page views when I hit this milestone in 2017 and again in late 2019 to include the extra knowledge I have after building up many other blogs. Then in 2024, I updated it again now that I am not focused on SEO. However, the advice is exactly the same as it was when I hit 100,000.
If you want to learn exactly how I am building up traffic to my blogs in 2025 using methods other than SEO, click here and join my newsletter. I only share how I’m currently building traffic with email marketing, Pinterest, Facebook pages, Flipboard and more in this newsletter.
I also highly recommend you join my FREE course, Diversify Your Traffic: 9 Day Blog Action Plan. In this course, I walk you through exactly how I get traffic from the methods I mentioned above such as Pinterest and Facebook.
It’s the most detailed free course I have ever seen. And since I don’t sell any paid courses, you don’t have to worry about it being a tease and needing to pay to see the juicy parts.
You will learn...
- My secret weapon for increasing page views
- How to increase traffic to your blog: Marketing plans
- What are my marketing plans to increase blog traffic?
- How do I chose which marketing plan for which blog post?
- What are some of the pitfalls which may prevent success?
- Final thoughts
Even though this article is specifically about my old travel blog, the tips here apply across all blogs and sites and niches that have content the owners wish to market (and if you don’t wish to market them, why produce the content?). This post covers strategies that are still up to date and relevant to help you increase blog traffic 2025.
One of the common questions I get asked, is, “how to get views on my blog”? I have built successful sites in many niches including travel, lifestyle, working online and parenting. The principles are the same. Regardless of your niche, these guidelines that I’m sharing again today will help you with how to increase blog traffic.
1. My secret weapon for increasing page views
You can see how my site grew from October 2013 when I relaunched my site in WordPress and went from an online journal with 0 page views to a far more professional travel blog.
And yes. The basic strategies that I employed in 2013-2014 are still working for me today. That’s because they were and still are solid and effective strategies that, to this day, increase traffic to my blogs.
I can take you through the different stages of what I did then and do now. I can explain what effect it had, etc, but I think the most interesting things to talk about is how I took the site from those beginning stages – where I left off in my 12,000 page views article – and took it to over 100,000 with continuous growth, even when I was not working on this site at all.
This is a strategy that I employ on all my sites. Regardless of the niche.
My big secret…
Have a marketing plan for every single blog post
This may seem obvious, and if you already do this, yay! You are on to a good thing.
However, I’m willing to bet the majority of bloggers who are asking “how to get more page views on my blog” out there do not.
Every time I hear the mostly pointless advice of it all being about writing quality content, I just want to barf.
What does it matter how quality your content is if no one reads it?
I am not saying you shouldn’t write quality content, of course, you should. You should also be doing a lot more than that and you should have a plan of how to get traffic to your blog before you even start writing.
Click Here to Download a FREE Worksheet to help you create a marketing plan for your blog posts!
You should always know for each post who the audience is for that post (your target audience) and how you will get readers to your blog post.
I didn’t always do this. I managed to get to over 20,000 page views without thinking about it much at all. However, I would not have made it to my current level without it, so this is a key point to consider when asking how to increase my blog views, and it’s a big part of my blogger traffic increase success story.
2. How to increase traffic to your blog: Marketing plans
- After the initial promotion on social media, who do you want to see this post?
- What is the best way to ensure this audience will see this post?
- How will you make it happen?
As I’ve already said, if you want solutions for how to increase views on blog posts, marketing plans have been a game changer for me.
You do not have to write down your responses or have a written plan. You just need to make smart decisions based on these questions.
If you do your best to ensure that the right people will see your post on an ongoing basis then you will always have traffic on your blog.
Not only this, but your traffic will increase overall as you add new content. Instead of seeing little bursts when you add a new post, you should just see a continuous upward trend. Increasing blog traffic in this way is a sustainable, long-term plan that will deliver growth to your site.
3. What are my marketing plans to increase blog traffic?
It is very very very very rare that I write any post any more for any site without a purpose. I don’t have the time. The purpose involves money to some degree or sponsored travel in the cases where we want an experience we can’t afford.
I will admit that sometimes the purpose is quite thin – like I find it hard not to write about a destination we loved even if I don’t see it making much money from commissions because not enough people plan to go there. But I acknowledge this and think through whether I can really afford the time on this.
I rarely write more than two articles a week as otherwise, I spend too much time writing instead of marketing. I even think that writing two a week is spending too much time writing and often write less. It is much more productive when monetising to spend the time working out how to increase page views.
There are many ways I market articles. These strategies are not mutually exclusive. Most articles are marketed in at least two of these ways and some have more. However, every article has a main way that I plan to market it and how I hope it will gain an ongoing audience.
You can read more about these strategies in my newsletter.
3.1. SEO – Good Solid Keyword Research
Google search traffic is an excellent way to gain an ongoing audience for your articles. Good solid keyword research is my favourite way to increase traffic on blog posts. SEO is, in fact, my number one way to answer the question “How do I get more readers for my blog?”
In addition to good keywords, your site needs to have good authority (think about link building) and quality, long articles.
You can read more about how I find keywords in this article.
I cannot recommend enough being strategic about how you pick keywords. Use my favourite tool in the universe, KeySearch, and pick keywords your articles can rank for.
If you look at my page views above, you can see how my growth was quite small during most of 2014 and then it took off again. In December 2014 is when I started getting smart about using many keywords in articles and my page views really took off after that. This is also why I was confident that my page views would continue to grow. 200,000, I knew would not be far away!
In 2025, SEO is not as easy as it once was, but it still does come fairly easy to new sites. The problem is once you stop being new and get to the 50k page view per month mark. Then Google seems to target you in not nice ways (search for the “helpful content update” if you don’t know what I mean).
It’s never been more important to market your article a variety of ways. You can read detailed instructions on how I do it now in my weekly newsletter here.
3.2. SEO – Relevancy
If there is one thing that has become apparent in 2019 that Google sees as an important search indicator its relevancy. It is no longer enough that you produce a well-researched article that contains all the keywords to rank in SERPs. Your content AND site need to be relevant in 2019. So that means that your entire article needs to be relevant. Your supporting content (i.e. other posts) need to be relevant. Any inbound links need to be relevant. Any outbound links need to be relevant.
It’s all about authority and not just you proving that you have authority in your niche, but that the rest of the world sees you as authoritative as well.
I wrote an in-depth article on the importance of relevancy especially when you want to increase pageviews – you can read it here.
3.3. Pinterest
I LOVE Pinterest. It is so different from other forms of social media like Twitter and Facebook. In fact, I would say it is closer to google search as it is basically a search engine – but one that uses images.
Pinterest is an excellent way to market articles. My most popular pin in Pinterest continued to draw over 4,000 page views a month 19 months after I first published it. Can you imagine that happening in Twitter? It wouldn’t.
Having a smart Pinterest strategy is an excellent way to grow your blog traffic. If you want results more quickly than SEO can provide, Pinterest is a good strategy to consider when thinking about how to get views on blog posts you already have.
You can copy my Pinterest strategy here. I share it in this free course.
I am still focused on Pinterest in 2025 and working hard to make it a big traffic stream on my newest sites. I share exactly how in my newsletter which you can join here.
3.4. Email Subscribers
If you are not putting effort into collecting email subscribers, START RIGHT NOW!!!
If you have attracted people to your site via SEO, Pinterest or other methods then why wouldn’t you want to ensure they keep coming back.
Subscribers are gold. They chose to follow you after all. This article is not about collecting them. You can read my articles about picking an email marketing service and how to increase email subscribers for that.
After you have started collecting your subscribers, set up an autoresponder series.
The majority of bloggers just send out their latest posts and I think this is a mistake. This is because it means that new subscribers will never see that awesome content that you produced in the past that could be just perfect for them.
I send subscribers through an automated series of emails. On most sites, I have sent these out every few days to weekly. Recently, I started sending them daily to my newest email list. Just a couple of months in, I am getting over 10k page views a month from email. This will only grow as I grow my email list as that is with just a couple of thousand of subscribers.
Regardless of my niche, it sends subscribers to key posts on my websites. This is another great way to keep growing page views on old content and earn affiliate commissions as well.
Not only that but I have found subscribers are far more engaged with a series of emails like this than a newsletter which just discusses what you are writing about now. Whenever bloggers discuss their open rates, mine tend to be far higher than people who send out the traditional newsletter of the latest posts.
I do not find this surprising as:
- I only try to get readers to subscribe who are my ideal audience rather than just targeting everyone or running competitions where people have to sign up to enter. See my strategy here.
- My autoresponders are about more general topics than many of my most recent posts. I make this part of my strategy for EACH of my sites. This REALLY works for me so I replicate the strategy across each different niche.
You are not going to find an email marketing service with a free autoresponder series. This will cost although it is minimal when you are starting out.
I recommend Kit unless you have a complex sales funnel – which is when my current solution ActiveCampaign really fits the bill.
3.5 Segmentation and Focus on Emails to Improve Blog Traffic
The wider your niche the more important it is to focus and segment when it comes to marketing to your email base. You will ALWAYS have more success and drive more page views to your blog if you are marketing content to readers who are interested in it, than if you’re just using a scattergun approach to throw lots of content out in email and HOPE someone reads it.
You WILL see great open rates if you segment and focus your email content. You WILL see greater click through rates. And of course, you will, therefore, increase blog pageviews.
3.6 Building Community Around Your Blog
A powerful way to grow you blog reach when you’re wondering how to get more pageviews, is to build a community around your blog by setting up a Facebook group.
Facebook groups are a powerful way to not only increase blog page views but also to grow your authority on your niche or topic that you cover on your blog. It also helps you to increase reader engagement and the chances of people coming back to your blog for related content over and again.
Once you have your Facebook group set up, the best way to increase your blog page views from there is to share your own blog content, together with other content that your group members are likely to find engaging and useful.
Building community has been a game changer for this blog – DNW – and for other sites that I run as well.
You can read more about utilising Facebook groups for your blog here.
3.7 Facebook Pages
Facebook pages were a game changer for my blogs in 2024 and continue to be. They were the main reason I was able to get a new blog on Raptive.
While Facebook groups are great for growing community, they just don’t get blog traffic like a Facebook page can. Mainly because people share engaging Facebook page posts and this can lead to viral traffic. It’s crazy how much traffic you can get from a Facebook page.
But it does need to be the right type of article you share. One that gets people attention, is engaging and compelling.
I share all about how I get Facebook traffic in my free course here.
4. How do I choose which marketing plan for which blog post?
For each of my sites, this depends on the topic.
Prior to 2023, I had a main focus on the top four strategies above.
For US and Caribbean travel content, Pinterest knocked them out of the park. I find that I used to struggle to rank in Google for keywords for US and Caribbean destinations and the pins for these places just perform so well in Pinterest that I didn’t put as much effort into SEO.
For other destinations, sites and niches I have the opposite approach. If they don’t perform as well in Pinterest and I find it easier to rank in Google so I put a lot MORE effort than usual into keyword research.
For more general, travel planning type articles and for my destination site blog, Dive into Malaysia, I think about what could be most useful to my email subscriber list.
Currently, I am far more focused on my Facebook page and email list. I do not worry about SEO keywords anymore.
What will work best for you very much depends on your site, your topics and your audience. Work out where is the best place to find your target audience and market your articles there. Identifying where your traffic is coming from for a particular post or category is key. You can use this in working out the most effective way of how to increase traffic to your blog posts.
Just remember that you don’t just want to market them once, you want to ensure that you keep marketing your content to its target audience.
If you don’t have all the answers right now, don’t worry. You probably won’t. It takes time. It also evolves and changes over time.
What you want to start doing now is planning how you will market your articles even if you don’t know the right answer. You can then learn from what works and doesn’t work and improve your process for next time.
5. What are some of the pitfalls which may prevent success?
My biggest frustration when other bloggers talk to me about how I am “lucky” to be making decent money when they are not is when I see them putting no real thought into how they will market their content.
All bloggers are short of time. If you don’t have the time at the moment to have a marketing plan then cut back on other activities.
For example, write fewer blog posts.
It is much smarter to write fewer blog posts, but do a better job of marketing them, than write many and have no one read them after the first week.
Click Here For My FREE Worksheet To Help You Create A Marketing Plan For Your Blog Posts!
The other big pitfall is sponsored articles and whether that’s a sponsored post or a review, like sponsored travel. The articles that need to be produced from these activities do not always lend themselves to good marketing and is one of many reasons why I would recommend bloggers looking to make their blog into a business be careful about what they take on in this area.
Be sure that ANY activity is really worth your time.
6. Final thoughts on How to Get More Blog Traffic
This was, an amazing milestone to hit. And looking back and using what I learned and what I now use for all articles on all my sites it STILL reminds me that the time and effort put in is well worth it.
I am STILL careful not to chase page views for the sake of page views. And my constant reminder of this is that page views don’t necessarily correlate to my business goals. So when you consider what YOUR business and blog goals are, ask yourself if page views are the goal or whether its actually something else that you’re aiming for.
I hope this article has given you some clarity on how to increase blog traffic for free and around how you can take your own blog forward and that you have the key elements of how to get more page views. Be strategic and think about how you can reach your ideal readers and improve blog traffic at the same time! Good luck!
Want some help with getting traffic? Join my free newsletter here now.
Read how to make more money from blogging here or other tips for how to gain readers here. You can also read my list of ways to gain more traffic and make more money from your existing posts here.
Want help to meet your blogging goals? Want to share your views on how to get more blog views? Join my FREE Facebook group here.
What marketing strategies do you use for your content?
Disclaimer: There are affiliate links in this post. If you make a purchase after clicking on these links then I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. These are all products I use and love and I feel confident will help you as well. Thanks!
About the Author
Sharon is passionate about working online and helping others to follow in her footsteps. She started blogging in 2005, but became serious about it when she left Australia with her young family at the end of 2014 determined to grow an online business. She succeeded by becoming a SEO and affiliate marketing expert and now supports her family of 5 to live their dream lifestyle. She has a degree in web development, a graduate diploma of education (secondary teaching) and consumes everything SEO. She loves putting her teaching diploma to good use by teaching other bloggers how to have the same success that she has had.
Leave a Reply96 comments
Sharon, thank you for sharing your journey to 100,000 pageviews – that is certainly a big milestone! I agree that every post needs a marketing plan – I like to think that I have gotten better over time at this aspect but I still have further to go – and your tips should help me into the future.
Good luck with the journey to 200,000 – I am sure you will get there much faster again!
Thanks Anne! It can be hard to keep doing everything consistently when there is just so much to do. If I keep up the growth I have seen so far this year, I will reach it this year!! I find it hard to believe I could grow that much though. We will see!
Congratulations Sharon! You’ve reached another huge milestone and after reading your post I can see why. You’re an extraordinary marketer!
Sharon, were you writing this as a personal email to me? Ha! You hit it home with me. My marketing plan is sporadic and just try and do what I can everywhere and mess up half the time or forget. I try to do it all rather than be strategic and that is it!!! Just 2 weeks ago, I cut back on writing, for 3 years I had in my mind I had to do 3 posts a week. We have been! And never had the time to market.
So earlier in the month I decided not to write and instead reorganize the blog, write some awesome cornerstone pieces and highlight the old. You know what? It’s been working! So now to take it a step further with your advice of marketing plan for each piece. I have been treating them all equal and they aren’t. Thanks!!!
Thanks Heidi! I remember discussing with you in Penang about your three posts a week and trying to nudge you away from that lol. I think it is a very good move. Something I didn’t write here and perhaps should have is the fact that they aren’t all equal. Some are just brilliant and deserve extra treatment in the marketing stakes.
I try to make the majority of my articles like cornerstone pieces. Best way to ensure I keep growing my rankings in google 🙂 I can find it frustrating when I talk in Google groups about SEO and some people slam me like I am not talking about having quality, like that means I don’t believe in growing subscribers or followers, etc etc. These things don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Writing great content (but to a plan) is the best way to meet all goals I think. That takes time though and it’s too hard to write too many pieces like this a week.
Thanks for sharing what I consider to be invaluable advice. I actually think that you have explained this better than the ‘content is king’ that we all read about. Content that has a marketing plan is what many so called professionals failed to mention. Good work and huge congratulations. There is no doubt that you have worked very hard, but better still, you have worked smart.
Thanks Paula! I like to think so (about working smart). I do get really annoyed by all the “content is king” articles that have no real substance. Blogging just isn’t that easy as we all know.
Well you know my recommendation on that topic 🙂 Writing is essential obviously, but there are so many more tasks which can be even more important once you already have some content.
Hi Sharon,
I also have a marketing plan but it is not as strategic and focused than what you do starting with long tail key words that I have been lacking on and of course an email list which is dismal and I know these both are great ways to broaden the base. I’ve already been spending a lot of time on Pinterest which is already my #1 resource outside of SEO so those are both working quite well. Thanks for this post – it has been inspiring for me to work through those areas that are still lacking.
Hey Noel,
Thanks to Sharon, Pinterest has also now become my biggest social media traffic driver. It’s not amazing but it beats Twitter which was always first social media wise.
Thanks Sharon, we are reaping the rewards of your great advice.
On the Atlanta to Miami article, how long did it take for you to place on Google’s page one for this topic?
Hi Cacinda! Unfortunately, I don’t know this as I only track my more affiliate based posts for rankings. It generally takes me 3-6 months to have an article rank on the first page in search results. It can be random exactly how long especially when it comes to posts with strong US competition for US rankings for me.
This is quite impressive Sharon,
You’ve really reached a great milestone that most of us are still struggling to attain and I’m soooooo happy for you dear, you need to buy yourself a bottle of what you like drinking :).
I agree with you. Most of us don’t usually spend any time to market our blog posts and that was also the same mistake i was making.
My Mentor (Jon Morrow) advised that you should always spend 30% writing your posts and the other 70% promoting it and this is really a no brainier.
The era of build it and they come has long passed today, if you really want them to come then, you’ve got to invite them and give them good reasons to else, your post will be buried forever.
Its always important to have a goal whenever you’re writing your articles as you mentioned, you need to know exactly what you expect to get from that article even before hitting the publish button.
Thanks for sharing Sharon and more strength to your elbows.
Theo
Hi Theo, thanks for your kind and informative words 🙂 I’m trying to think what % I spend writing. It’s probably about that and I think that is too much! I spend a lot of hours working though.
I’ve realised with all of this that I need to follow my own advice for this site! I think it’s a great example of what happens when you write great content but do not put much effort into marketing it or thinking through beforehand how I will make it work.
So much golden advice here!
I’ve been a long-term fan of using Pinterest and have devoted much of 2015 to “figuring it out”. I am constantly testing and experimenting and the results have been impressive.
Do you ever use outreach to promote your posts? Do you build backlinks to specific posts? I know you mention guest posting but do you link to your homepage or to your specific posts?
Hi Richard! I do very little in regards to Outreach and link building. My site already had good DA before I became more strategic. The upside of this is that I haven’t needed to bother, but the downside is that I did do a fair bit of guest posting initially but not in a clever way. Basically all links were to my home page (not what I would recommend) and I didn’t focus on sites with high authority.
The only sort of link building I do now is contributing to other travel blogger’s collaborative posts. I link to individual posts whenever they let me in those.
Thanks again for sharing your strategy,
easy and effective writing. A rare gift to have! Well done.
I went through a full review of my website and I guess, like most of the bloggers out there, I understood that I was writing too much but rarely real quality posts.
The real quality ones are shared by readers and create more traffic, the others generate occasional traffic which is not enough to sustain a website.
Can I say that content is king but SEO is queen? They work together. I may have understood that too late unfortunately. I am also fed up with myself about not having used Pinterest (such a great potential missed there) and you are 100% right, Pinterest is a visual search engine at the end of the day.
What I was thinking about LOL You should start a mentoring program!!
For some reasons I am now using Postcron (FB+TW scheduling). It’s quite good but not the best, enough for my website. I need to start working on tailwind. That’s now mandatory!! + plugin to automate posting from WP to all the social.
You opened my eyes. Sure I am using your affiliation links and that would be the minimum I can do beside spreading the voice of how good is this website.
One thing I wanted to ask you is about the mobile world. How much of your 100K page views come from mobile? Do you have a strategy? Is your website mobile ready or optimized for that? Do you see a difference in the way the mobile users go through your website…any other comment/suggestion?
I am asking you that because, although having a very small traffic I noticed that the mobile traffic is now more than 50% and increasing quickly.
Many thanks and great work again, great achievement!!
Lol I have thought about a mentoring program as I do get requests and I was a teacher and enjoy teaching. However, at this stage, I don’t think I would earn enough money to make it worthwhile especially when I am short of time. I might revisit the idea again next year when we are back home, especially if the site I am mentoring my brother to build is successful (which I’m confident it will be) 🙂
I’ve heard many people talk about Co-schedule wordpress plugin for doing social media from wordpress. I only used the trial version but it looks good. It’s annoying that there isn’t a good tool that does everything. I use something separate for each social media platform at the moment.
If you haven’t checked out https://ifttt.com/recipes then do that. They have some great “recipes” which helps automate social media sharing too – I use a recipe to automatically tweet photos I put on Instagram. I have had on my list for ages to spend a couple of hours working out what else might be helpful too. There seems to be a lot of great stuff on there and once you set it, you can just forget about it.
Great questions with the mobile stuff! That area concerns me a bit as I imagine there are less purchases made from mobile phones as I know I wouldn’t purchase with one. Plus some affiliates don’t work if people use mobile and have their app installed. Grrr! I have stuck my head in the sand with this problem as I am not ready to take on the full challenge.
At the moment, 44% of my sessions are mobile, 41% desktop and the rest tablet. My page views/sessions is higher on desktop so maybe half the page views are from desktop. It’s a similar percentage on my niche sites too. All sites are mobile ready although speed scores etc, for where’s sharon are worse for mobile.
I really need to spend a decent amount of time in GA learning how to see the differences with what happens with mobile compared to desktop so I can comment better (and optimise) this. I wish I had a way of seeing the differences in sales between the two as that would be interesting.
Sharon,
As always you provide an amazing insight and have me intrigued by every word you write.
Hitting 100k+ a month is a major success and I congratulate you on that. Your success is well deserved.
I think I need to work more on my marketing plan based on this.
I’ve often performed key word research yet with mixed results. Now you as well as Pat Flynn advise more keywords per article, I need to do this.
I’ve had Longtail Pro for a month or so now and am getting around it. I always used Market Samurai in the past which sometimes scored me onto page 1 for Google and sometimes nowhere. Hopefully with the 2 I can find a good fit.
Thanks again for sharing your experiences. As for your comments about targeted audience, I’m definitely one of yours!
Thanks 😀 The annoying part about keyword research is that no matter how well you do it, sometimes it just doesn’t work out. I think this may be why some people give up too easily or say it doesn’t work. Some of my keyword plans work beautifully, much better than I expect, some full flat, but I do overall get better and better at predicting this all the time. Perhaps something else I should have written about here is the importance of measure the success of your marketing – the only way to really get better at keyword research is to measure what is and isn’t working for you. Same with Pinterest and anything else.
Hi Sharon, as well the great surname, love the sites too. My wife and I have been messing about with our own website for the past few weeks. What started off as one focussing on photography has morphed into something completely different. Not sure if that has been a good thing or not! Am a bit confused about where we will head with it at this stage but am having fun doing it. We hope to be off travelling again soon so will see what inspiration that generates. Congratulations on the milestone and all the best of luck.
Hi Alan, nice to meet another Gourlay. I barely know any! Thanks for the compliment and I am sure if you keep working on your site that you can get there too 🙂
Thanks Kate! I have a super useful keyword post coming out tomorrow hopefully, so you might want to check back then 😉
Bookmarking this to read later! I really want to start reaching more people through my blog and I need to practice what you’re doing!!
Hi Jo! Great to connect again 🙂 I no longer guest post. I accept them as long as they are in the same style as my articles – basically very helpful tutorials on some aspect of blogging or working online.
Hi Sharon
Thanks for the SEO tips. I’m lucky to get 1000 hits per month, but I think niche is too narrow, so I’m writing content more suited to travel and digital nomads now.
As an aspiring travel blogger, I find your success very inspiring! Thank you for taking the time to share your tips and tricks for blogging success. I’m so looking forward to your SEO crash course and boosting takeme-withyou.com to the next level.
Happy travels to you and your family!
Thanks Bob! The good old love/hate cycle of blogging. I have found money has helped me have less of the hate cycle! Good luck!
yea i totally agree,, although as my site is only a month old, i am trying my best to do as many articles about my destination as possible,, i seem to spend alot of time going back over things again and again,, but i have one simple goal, to cover the major areas of what i need to and then market the crap out of each one. i think we spend too much time creating and not promoting, but it is easy to get lost in the whole,,, it has to be perfect,,, but lets be honest a post doesnt have to be perfect firs time,, you can always update it,, add more info,, or keywords over time
keep up the good work, your an inspiration to us all
Hi Gary! Content creation can definitely be too much of a time suck if we let it and I can be such a perfectionist that I definitely get too caught up in the wrong things sometimes even when I know better. It can be a balancing act. Good luck!! 🙂
For sure. The real secret to my success is working hard and smart. The rest will happen if you put in the (right) hard yards. Up to 165,000 page views now by doing nothing different 🙂
Sharon,
I discovered your site just recently. My wife has been a travel writer/blogger for years but we’ve decided to leap into full time travel soon. As I make my way down the rabbit hole of SEO and blog marketing, finding you posts like this one that give details and clearly written info is a relief. As you mention, I’ve been worried that the only way to make money blogging is to talk about how to make money blogging but giving out real numbers (or percentages) is very reassuring. The path ahead is daunting but much clearer b/c of the info you’ve shared.
Thanks.
Thank you Henry! I’m so glad I have helped. Good luck on your journey into being digital nomads. Obviously I have found it a hugely rewarding path to take and my fingers are crossed for you.
It really is so evident how much hard work you put into your strategies, thanks for sharing them. Hands up, I am one of the RSS newsletter bloggers – something else to add to the list of things to tackle. Interesting to read your strategy for Google v Pinterest, I had never thought of it that way. Thanks again, Gemma.
Great insight Sharon and congrats on hitting that milestone!
I believe there’s a lot of untapped opportunity from Pinterest. From your experience, what has been the most valuable strategy from getting more traffic from Pinterest?
Thanks Jason! Group boards and pinnable images. If you haven’t already, you can read my strategies here.
I must have read this post 3-4 times this year, together with the 0 to 12k growth. All valuable suggestions. And looking back to my last 12 months I can see some of them helped a LOT.
Interesting I have spent lots of time on Pinterest but the traffic I get from there is not that great. The fact that I do not write about US locations may be an answer (at least I like to think so LOL).
I personally have a great experience with Twitter, lots of traffic, easy to manage (once you have the right tools), great stats, fantastic engagement…..and this is something I would like to ask you.
I had a bit of a talk with another travel blogger (a “well known” one) about traffic/engagement and I remember him telling me how traffic is not as important as social engagement (FB, TW, IG and the likes).
What is your opinion?
Personally I think that if the ultimate goal is $$ they can be both great….or a total failure. Having 200,000 page views without affiliation or anyway a way to make money (products, etc) is as worthless as having 10 million social impressions/view without a way to monetize that…..but I am really curious about your feedback and also on your thinking about the social engagement.
Cheers and great work again (in the almost no time I guess you have)
Hi Stef! That is great that these tips have helped you 🙂 Well done with getting Twitter to work for you.
Interesting questions! I personally think it all depends on your goals – and I always get very frustrated when bloggers say that there is only one way to be successful. I personally do not have a huge amount of social engagement, especially while I have been on maternity leave. If social engagement has helped that individual blogger’s goals, then obviously it has worked for him. I have wondered in the past when other bloggers have stated that engagement is most important and then I read their “work with us” page and their actual page views are very low, how they can claim to have influence over people when they can’t even influence them to go to their site. I have also been frustrated when I have had a “top” blogger tell me I have no influence and that referring lots of people to book things that I recommend is proof of nothing – which I would argue is quite the opposite. It sounds like our goals are similar and to me, it is all a waste of effort if I am not going to earn income from my activities.
Hi Sharon thank you for the inspiration.
Our blog has been stagnating for a long time now and although we put in many hours a week in articles we just can’t seem to boost the traffic it to the next level. I was beginning to think our articles are boring which is why we don’t get the traffic but I think it’s something more now. I can see now that marketing is so important. We post to social media including FB Twitter Pinterest with every new post and get an initial boost but I see your point on a specific plan . Interestingly when we check our stats Pinterest drives probably as much traffic to our site now as Google so I think that is one area we really need to concentrate in the future. Thank you again for the great article I’m so glad we came across it. Good luck for the future and keep up the great work.
Thanks Alan! Yes unfortunately having great content is not enough. Pinterest can be a superb referrer and it sounds like you are already doing something right. Good luck!
Hi,
Do you any idea about News Industries?
Because we are newsnation.in, a news portal providing worldwide exclusive news related to Politics, Business, Sports, Entertainment, tech and more! My concern is, how to increase Page Depth (Pages/Sessions). Because users are good, avg. session time is also good, but Page Views are not coming. So can you suggest any strategy which help us to increase PageViews.
Hi Arun,
A browser extension I found interesting is: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-analytics-by-google/fnbdnhhicmebfgdgglcdacdapkcihcoh?hl=en
It helps you see where people click. I found that people were much more likely to click on super relevant links, especially ones at the end of articles. These can either be in text or using a related posts plugin but it only really worked when they were on a very similar topic. Anyway, try on the extension and it might give you some ideas.
Thanks for sharing Sharon. Very inspiring post. I’ve yet to hit that milestone but I’ll use your tips here to good use!
I saw your name mentioned in a Facebook group for tips on this sort of stuff. Everything you said makes so much sense. I’m definitely going to read through your articles to learn how to market my content, as I struggle to increase page numbers. I would rather market them well than write a lot as you said. Thanks Sharon!
Hi Sharon,This is just the article i have been looking for, My website(it’s about facts and interesting articles from around the world),which we started again this month gets 150-180 views daily(after doing a lot of sharing on Social Media).
Any unique tip for us?
Thanks a lot.
Wow, your traffic is incredible! Congrats! And you’re so right about people saying you are lucky. They don’t see how much work, thought and time is behind that. My main goal for now is to invest more time in Pinterest. It seems to be such a great way to get traffic. I can’t understand why not more established businesses use it?! Anyway, thanks for sharing your experiences and insights, very helpful!
Thanks Denise! Yes, I do wonder why more established businesses aren’t making better use of a lot of this stuff! I’m glad they aren’t though 😉
Thank you for all the tips on Pinterest! I know it is something I need to get to grips with but have been putting it off for so long. Now with my new blog I am determined to get it right from the beginning and build an audience so if I must Pin then I must learn from scratch. Off to open a new account and get started.
Thank you
These are really some awesome some Tips to increase Traffic.
I was struggling with the Traffic on my Blog.
I ‘ll surely apply these Strategies.
Thanks for sharing with us 🙂
Sharon, this post is GOLD!! This is the second time I’ve read through it and I keep noticing new things. I downloaded the marketing template – thank you for sharing that!! Do you have any examples anywhere of how you’ve completed that for a particular blog post? I still struggle to know how much I need to be promoting (ie. how many tweets, how many FB posts, how else should I share a post) without driving people crazy! Thanks again for all the amazing information you provide!
Thanks Rebecca! No I don’t as these days I just do it in my head when I’m planning.
Great article with full of Informations. I am already following your all three strategies but after reading your article now I realized that I am not doing it properly. Now onwards I will follow your strategies. Thanks.
Thank you for sharing!!! In regards to Pinterest / Do you recommend it over Instagram? Do you think that Pinterest is for a specific type of business, or can be successfully used for any business?
Pinterest is far superior to Instagram if your goal is traffic to your blog. Pinterest is good if your target audience is on there.
Good material, Sharon! You can`t expect to start a blog and the reader will come alone to the blog! You have to work hard to earn your followers and not only with good content!
Sharon thank you so much for all of your honest and helpful tips & strategies! So much good advice in every post.
Same for anything in life you want to get to people. If you don’t know how you will make sure your target audience will find you, what is the point?
Thank you Sharon for such a detailed article! I have read your article about going from 0 to 12000 and this one. From 12000 to 500000.
This was an inspiration! As currently I hit 3000-3500 a month. I don’t have any marketing or monetization plans for my blog posts. I write when I can and about what is on my mind 🙂
But looks like I will need to work harder and definitely more smarter to hit that 10000/month goal in 2020.
Thank you again!
Hey Joseph! A big part of it is deciding if your blog is just meant to be a hobby – in which case do what you want – or a business – in which case writing about what is on your mind is not the best way to work out if it’s a good use of your time.
Wow, what a great article! This is so helpful in understanding how to increase traffic. What would you say is a good base level of posts to start focusing more on marketing rather than writing content?
I am definitely starting to focus more on Pinterest as a valuable source of readers. I think the question that we all need to ask ourselves more is what do we have to offer our readers?
Thanks for the article.
Day one – it’s all a waste of time if you don’t have any idea who you are writing for and how you will get the content to them. Of course, it’s hard to know from the beginning how to do anything well but that’s fine. If you are at least testing and trying to learn, you’ll get further faster.
Another set of great advice! I love your call for actions, it helps get rid of my lazy mindset . I also target for the US audience, great to know Pinterest works for them.
Hi Sharon,
you really covered everything I am not doing here (yet!). I honestly thought that writing and engaging on social media was enough but after 1 year I don’t have any traffic, my DA is inexistent and I didn’t monetise my blog.
I know now that I have a lot to do and I am shocked to realise how many things I was leaving behind “hoping” as you mentioned above, that someone would find me.
I have enrolled to your Build Blog Freedom Fast Track and I am thrilled to improve but I must admit that I feel a bit overwhelmed by the huge amount of things to edit, revise and many more to start from scratches.
Thanks for sharing with us your expertise!
That’s great that you can realise where you need to improve, Alba. The Fast Track will help a lot! Once you get on top of a strategy that works, it becomes a lot easier I promise!
This is a great post! I enjoyed reading ALL of your tips BUT the last sentence really got me about if page views are really my goal or if I am aiming for something else? Because my goal has always been to monetise my blog from day one. And I kind of felt bad for it because of others opinions. But at the end of the day, I have a strong reason why I want and need to monetise and you have opened up my thoughts to think about what I need to do in order to achieve that. Maybe I don’t need to strive for page views but just need to focus my marketing efforts better 🙂 And become laser-focused on what matters, finding the right places to promote it and making sure the right audience is going to see it. Hoping to get accepted into your FB group 🙂 See you there, Kris
That’s exactly what you need to do 🙂 Page views don’t equal profits.
Hello Sharon.
I found this article very useful. And applied some strategies like SEO Solid keyword research, building email list, etc. And these strategies are actually working very well. Thank you so much.
Much obliged for offering this great article to us and a debt of gratitude is in order for your assistance. Great work and enormous congrats!
This post is worth than than a million dollar for me.
After reading it I implement some of the tips on my gaming website, and guess what for around a year i was grow like 500 pageviews daily.
After implementing these tips for around a month my next month was around 3.0k- 3.5k daily pageviews. Means I just hit 100k monthly pageview. Growth rate was over 40%.
I mean what the heck, it took me a whole year to reach 15k monthly pageviews and now suddenly it jumped to 100k.
I really love you, will you marry me. lol btw thnx.
Pinterest once closed my account! Phew! I was stranded. Tried to appeal but rude shock! I was informed thro email that I could not recover the content and followers I had amassed. I gave up on it and avoided Pinterest for a year.
Great article on increasing traffic to your blog! One strategy that has worked well for me in the past is guest posting on other relevant blogs and websites. Not only does it expose my blog to a new audience, but it also helps to build backlinks to my site, which can boost my search engine rankings. Keep up the good work!
Hello, thanks for sharing this article especially in keywords, marketing strategies and best way to increase the traffic view blog.
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